“Forget Vientiane, it’s rubbish”

The quote that is the title of this post was a hand written note that a friend from Melbourne had written prior to me leaving. Mary – you were spot on! As mentioned previously Vientiane was not in the least bit exciting. We didn’t do one touristy thing while we were there. We hung around there just long enough to get our Chinese visas. We paid double to get them in 24 hours rather than wait 3 days. We didn’t realise how good our timing was since the next day it was a Chinese holiday and the embassy was closing for a week. Whilst we were in China we met someone that got stuck in Vientiane waiting for the embassy to reopen. He had the same feelings as us towards the Laos capital and spent most of the time hanging out in his hotel room. Rather than doing this Peach & I discovered a restaurant that served awesome food and then gave you free internet. So we spent a lot of time there. We also spent a lot of time trying to figure out what do once we got our passports back from the Chinese embassy and we could hightail it outta Vientiane.

After lots of to-ing and fro-ing we decided to continue heading south towards the famed 4,000 islands. Then if we had time we’d head back up north later on and check out the parts we missed before overlanding it into China. The main reason I never tried to make plans on this trip was because things always changed. This time was no different – as you’ll discover in future posts.

We got our passports back at about 4pm on Tuesday and were booked on an overnight bus to Pakse, the main hub of the south, 4 hours later. Not soon enough. We were supposed to be picked up at our hotel at 8pm. By this time on the trip we expected some kind of drama everytime we had to catch a bus. Almost as if scripted our pick up time came and went. Peach dashed down to the agent who we booked our tickets through a couple of times and he assured us everything would be ok, he called the driver and there’d been some mistake. Sure. Whatever.

Eventually a tuk-tuk big enough to fit about 10 people showed up to take us to the bus station. The bus was due to leave in 15 minutes and we were 30 minutes away. The tuk-tuk was almost full and the people inside it informed us that the driver had done about 3 laps of the city picking people up.

There was one particularly funny English guy sittng across from us. As the ride dragged on we got talking about how we’d hoped to go trekking up north but had to come to Vientiane instead. This guy’s response was “Well, you know, trekking. It’s a lot like bum sex isn’t it?” Everyone in the tuk-tuk just stared at him, shortly followed by bursts of laughter. What a random comment? He went on to explain that he felt that some people try bum sex and really like it, and for other people it’s not for them. He and his wife had been on a horror trek in Thailand and decided trekking wasn’t for them. I didn’t know who this guy was but I got a kick out of his perspective. Plus he was piss funny. I didn’t know it then but we’d end up spending the next week or so travelling together and I can honestly say they were our favourites in terms of all the friends we made in Asia, and there was some quality competition!

The guy in question was Chris and his lovely wife was Nicola. They were both English and travelling through Asia on their way to settling in NZ. As luck would have it they sat behind us on the bus to Pakse. We continued our conversation there and quickly discovered some remarkable similarities between Chris and I and Peach and Nicola. It was as if we were a mirror couple.

When we reached Pakse in the morning we parted ways only to be reunited some minutes later as we ended up on the same tuk-tuk. Peach and I had heard Pakse was just as shit as Vientiane so our plan was to head across town to another bus station where we’d get another bus 4 hours to a tiny place called Tadlo which we’d heard great things about. Chris and Nicola were going to stay in Pakse for the night and then continue heading south. We managed to convince them to come with us though and we all ended up at the other bus station.

The bus station was a large dusty area with some shonky looking restaurants and food sellers. We had an hour or so to kill until our bus so I grabbed a noodle soup. The others weren’t so keen on the look of the hygeine. They had bananas instead.

Luckily I’d managed to sleep quite well on the bus – the VIP buses in Laos were even more luxurious than the ones in Thailand. As a result I didn’t mind the next 4 hour bus ride to Tadlo on a rattling, unairconditioned public bus. After a ride through some beautiful scenary the bus dropped us on a corner in the middle of nowhere. Apparently Tadlo was a couple of kilometres walk away.